Odd Words August 18, 2011

Is it Wednesday? Already? Again? Where’s the big red Emergency Stop button? Wait, by the time you read this its Thursday. Don’t panic. You didn’t lose a day. I’m the one with time management problems.

& Whether you’ve got the blues & can’t be satisfied, or if you’re satisfied, please join Octava Books for an evening of literature and music as Philip Ratcliffe gives a presentation and signs his new biography of the immortal Mississippi John Hurt, one of the greatest blues musicians of all times. Ratcliffe will be joined by local singer/songwriter Joe Barbara for a live performance of some of the music of Mississippi John Hurt. Thursday, Aug. 18 at 6 p.m.

&OK, class, it’s time for another Drunken Spelling Bee. This one is to benefit artist T-LOT’s show “Range” which opens this October. OK, it’s not a book event but a drunken spelling bee? I mean why the hell not. And the idea as best I can tell originated with the sponsors of the annual New Orleans Book Fair so I’m making an executive decision and letting this one in. If you find any misspelling in this post, I will buy you a drink which is about the surest bet you can get in this town. Thursday, Aug. 18 at 7:30 p.m. at the Love Lost Lounge.

& Fridays at The Love Lost Lounge, black knight errant Thaddeus Conti is cooking up another poetry reading, in the back room starting at 5:30 p.m. just about the time the kitchen opens. And damn the food is good. At least I think he’s doing it regularly so check back in case I’ve got it wrong. Fridays, 5:30 p.m., Love Lost Lounge until we’re all 86ed and onto the next juke joint.

& I always forget to list this but the Jimmy Ross Dumpster Diving For Books Memorial Book Sale at the Milton Latter Memorial Library is on Wednesdays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. as well as Saturdays. Because you can never have too many books. I mean, you know that zombies can’t smell you if you’re in a room full of books, right?

& Don’t forget to tune into Susan Larson’s The Reading Life show on WWNO-FM (its the one right next to WWOZ, fool) every Tuesday at 6:30 pm with a rebroadcast on Saturdays. I would be remiss in my editorial duties if I didn’t point out that I’m the first guest this coming Tuesday, but you should go ahead and listen anyway because you’ll probably like it anyway. The other guest is Jordan Flaherty, author of FLOODLINES: COMMUNITY AND RESISTANCE FROM KATRINA TO THE JENA SIX. Flaherty will also be a panelist at Rising Tide 6.

& A week from today you have another chance to get a signed copy Jennifer Shaw’s Chin Music Press book HURRICANE STORY (the slow boat full of books having finally arrived from China). A fascinating collection of images shot with a disposable medium format camera illustrating a brief text of her Katrina exodus, it is (like everything else from CMP) a physically gorgeous and textually fascinating book. And you get to hang out at the Ogden (I may have to get the seersucker out if I can only find a pair of bucks somewhere cheaper than Rubenstein’s). And it’s during Ogden After Hours so you can grab a real cocktail instead of signing wine and listen to some excellent music. Thursday, Aug. 25 at 6 pm., Ogden Museum of Art.

& We’ve all heard the horror stories of the hospitals after Katrina, the anecdotes about the nurse who stayed for Katrina and will not come back to New Orleans. Here is a piece of the back story to that tale: “What’s it like to be a patient with advanced cancer trapped in a hospital with no electricity or running water and no way to escape? Carolyn Perry vividly recounts her husband’s ordeal in the flood-ravaged devastation following Katrina. In “FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE: PATIENT IN THE MAELSTROM Perry tells the gripping story of two people in a loving marriage, fighting a relentless disease and swept up in the chaos of a man-made disaster. Thursday, Aug. 25 at Garden District Books, 5:30 p.m.

& Mark your calendars for two weeks from Thursday when George Pelecanos will read from, discuss, and sign his new book, THE CUT, at Octavia Books. Thursday, Sept. 1 at 6 p.m.

The Typist

About Toulouse Street

Toulouse Street began as a memoir of place, subtitled Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, set in the character of the eponymous city. Over time is has grown in strange ways. It is, to borrow novelist Tim O'Brien's line: A Fiction. It is loosely based on the life of a man of late middle age racing frantically towards and away from death. Any apparently auto-biographical bits are about "me", The Typist, in the sense that the ringing of wind chimes is about the weather. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is chronologically orthogonal.
Odd Words was birthed in 2010 as a prominent feature when the local newspaper folded its Books page and literary listings disappeared from the scene. To see your event listed there, contact odd.words.nola@gmail.com.

"I love the friends I have gathered together here on this thin raft." -- Jim Morrison

Copyright Notice

All original work here (www.toulousestreet.net, toulousestreet.wordpress.com) is (c) 2006-2014by Mark A. Folse
Any outside copyrighted material presented here is done so for the purposes of news reporting and comment consistent with USC 17 Chapter 1 Title 107. Any copyrighted work or trademarks presented here remain the property of their owners.
For content titled Odd Words, see the Creative Commons notice above.

Where We Know

Chin Music Press' latest--Where We Know--features pieces by Howling editors and contributors Ray Shea, Sam Jasper and Mark Folse alongside Lolis Eric Elie and a host of other local writers, mingled with historical works by Lafacadio Hearn and others. This beautiful book is itself a work of art with fabulous endplate illustrations. Get your's today.

Carry Me Home

Carry Me Home is a geo-memoir of post-Federal Flood New Orleans and the story of one expat's rediscovery of the home he left 20 years earlier.

"[Carry Me Home] belongs on the bookshelf alongside the other worthy post-Katrina works."
• Chin Music Press Voices of New Orleans

"It’s more than a love letter to New Orleans – it’s a survival guide for post-Katrina America. Mark shows how to go through a disaster with your soul intact.”
• Michael Tisserand

Buy it today at Lulu, Amazon,
or at these independent New Orleans bookstores:

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Read New Orleans

Please visit a local bookstore, like deVille Books, Maple Street, Garden District Bookstore, Octavia, Farbourg Marigny, Faulkner House Books. If you're not here and want to read some excellent New Orleans work, check out some of the title's below on Amazon.